A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world

weeklyOSM 434

Mapping

Gregory Marler made a Youtube tutorial showing how he is using his own 360 degree images from Mapillary for editing with JOSM.

It looks as if the mapping done by Grab (the Uber of South-East Asia) does cause major problems. Quote from Russ McD “…what we are seeing is another major organisation, allowing a bunch of amateurs loose on a training ground they call OSM. They are all being paid, while us volunteers, mop up the mess.” But read it for yourself.

We recently reported that Telenav has open-sourced the machine learning based street sign detection and the resulting training data that recognises nearly 100 sign types. Telenav makes use of it with its OpenStreetCam platform, a service very similar to Mapillary. The OpenStreetCam JOSM plugin visualises detections in the latest version. Martijn van Exel describes a Power Validator Workflow, that enables you to validate entire trips with many detected signs very quickly on the OpenStreetCam website.

The question as to whether Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire should be labeled as independent country or as part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands was discussed in the forum. The thread gives some insight into different levels of independence of territories belonging still more or less to a kingdom

Community

For the past two weeks, the French community has been working (automatic translation) on the completeness of coverage of police stations and gendarmerie brigades (regional police) in France. This project was launched following the recent availability of good quality open data of gendarmerie reception points and their opening hours. The particularity of this update was that each gendarmerie is referenced by a unique key facilitating subsequent updates (address, phone, opening_hours). This project will also clarify the amenity=police without names and identify municipal police. It also involved working on the documentation in the wiki. Collaboration is ongoing with the National Gendarmerie Digital Mission.

[1] Arun Ganesh tweeted a teaser for the upcoming SOTM Asia on November 17 – 18, 2018 in Bangalore, India with a series of beautiful visualisations of 10 years OSM in India.

The download service from Geofabrik has a lot of users and Frederik Ramm, who operates it, is always trying to minimise traffic by offering data extracts as large as required but also as small as possible. One of the largest extracts for which no subdivision exists, is California. The question how California could be divided extract-wise revealed that Californian’s sensitivities play the most important role.

Five years after typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, user seav recounts the OSM related help in his user diary. Read how the typhoon has transformed OSM and its community in the Philippines.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation of Colombia has implemented OSM tools in Spanish (especially for Latin America and Colombia), such as the Tasking Manager and Umap and developed other tools that are hosted in a high availability data centre in Germany. A fundraising campaign asks for your help to sustain this infrastructure for at least two more years.

The World Bank features an article about OSM and the rise of the local mapping communities. The blog post highlights the participatory mapping in Asia and Africa, something that a regular reader of WeeklyOSM may already be aware of, given the increasing number of such projects we have mentioned, as well as the fact that developers from Silicon Valley, African city planners and even humanitarian workers all work together around our OSM project.

Imports

Jeff Underwood, from Facebook, posted comprehensive documentation titled So how does Facebook’s AI Assisted Road Import Process work? about their machine learning based data generation for OSM in the user diaries. Facebook is currently uploading data for Thailand and partners with HOT in Indonesia.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Tobias Knerr (OSM Tordanik) announced that he will stand as a candidate for the upcoming OSMF board election.

Events

HOT announced that the HOT Summit 2019 will take place from September, 19 to 20 in Heidelberg, Germany.

Humanitarian OSM

MapAction, a humanitarian mapping organisation, published a report about the help that three volunteers and two staff members have provided in Malawi after the severe flood in January 2015.

On 28 November, a Missing Maps Mapathon will take place (automatic translation) in Grenoble from 18:00 to 21:00.

Education

The Volksfreund from Trierreports (automatic translation) about the start of an EU funded Erasmus+ project where teachers from five countries met in Saarburg, Germany, for an extensive OSM training. In particular, the article highlights a live link to Severin Menard, who reports on his experiences in Africa. The whole project will run for two years with the aim of inspiring many pupils in the participating European countries to take part in “humanitarian mapping”.

Open Data

The UK Geospatial Commission will announce a GBP 1.5 million competition for crowdsourced data on 26th November. The amount is approximately the same as OSM’s total running costs for its entire 14 year existence.

The Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) has published the new openelevationservice on GitHub, a Flask application which extracts elevation from various datasets for Point or LineString 2D geometries and returns 3D geometries in various formats.

SmugMug, the new owners of Flickr, announced major changes to the Ts&Cs for free Flickr accounts. A maximum of 1000 photos will be retained for these accounts which may affect OSM contributors and bloggers who have used Flickr for photos and other images.

Software

OSMCha received important updates. Now OSMCha is compliant with the GDPR legislation and it has a new way to receive flagged OSM features. Wille published two blog posts about this new release.

Tessio Novack and colleagues at Heidelberg University published an open access paper about generating customized pleasant pedestrian routes based on OpenStreetMap data and Openrouteservice. They present and evaluate how factors such as greenness, sociability, and quietness are extracted from OSM and used to adapt routes.

Programming

A “GDAL Coordinate System Barn Raising” has raised $144,000 to enable improvements to coordinate system libraries needed for the GDAL, PROJ, libgeotiff, PostGIS, and Spatialite open source toolchain.
The new libraries provide for higher accuracy transformations between coordinate systems that avoid transforming everything through WGS84 and eliminate the extra steps that this entails.

Andy Allan, a long time OSM contributor, blogged about Moderation, Authorisation and Background Task Improvements for OpenStreetMap. He gives a summary of the recent OSM codebase developments, including the help from the Ruby for Good team which contributed many improvements to OSM during their annual development event.

In his blog Christoph Hormann explains (automatic translation) how to deal with Mapnik’s broken support for SVG area patterns, i.e. the representation of areas such as forests and meadows. He developed a script that can easily change the format, PNG or SVG, to get the appropriate format, i.e. SVG for printing and PNG for online maps.

Christoph Hormann shares his German presentation with us on open map projects of the OSM community that he has used for his speech at the German Society of Cartography and Geomatics.

Releases

The German website mobilesicher.dereports (automatic translation) that the OSM based navigation app Magic Earth has removed the ties to Google, Facebook and Twitter from the app and is not sharing user data any more.

Did you know …

Anonymaps points out a Mapbox tweet about Porsche, that is using OSM based navigation from Mapbox although it owns a small indirect stake in HERE. We would like to point out that the ownership percentage stated by Anonymaps is wrong.

… osmoscope by Jochen Topf to fix bugs in OSM? You tried and Osmoscope doesn’t give the data to JOSM? This is probably because your browser does not have a certificate for the JOSM address or you haven’t enabled remote control. Try to access https://127.0.0.1:8112/version in your browser, with JOSM running locally. A certificate error may occur, if so you can enter an exception for it and from there on you should be able to fix many errors in the OSM database. 😉

In Germany there is the first cycle path (automatic translation) consisting of solar modules. The start-up company, Solmare, developed a 90m long test track with low voltage modules and installed this in Erftstadt/NRW. The company sees this development as a very successful future technology. The tagging of the cycle path was suggested with surface=solar_panel. There are further solar cycle paths e.g. in the Netherlands (automatic translation) (still without tagging…).